Archive for the ‘illustration’ Category

The Milton Caniff Estate recently loaned Animation Resources copies of two issues of Coronet magazine from 1942 and 1947 to digitize. Here are three articles of interest to cartoonists and illustrators…

AMERICA’S PIONEER JAP FIGHTER
By Howard Whitman

NORMAN ROCKWELL: The People’s Painter
By Jack H. Pollack

CONFESSIONS OF A COMIC STRIP ARTIST
By Milton Caniff

Thanks to John Ellis and the estate of Milton Caniff for sharing this with us!

Fantagraphics has a great book on Caniff’s career, and Checker has released year by year reprints of the classic Steve Canyon strip. Caniff was a master storyteller, and the first few years of Steve Canyon are examples of his genius at the height of its powers. Click on the pictures for more info.

This posting is part of a series of articles comprising an online exhibit spotlighting Illustration.This posting is part of the online Encyclopedia of Cartooning under the subject heading, Newspaper Comics.

In 1946, a young producer at Capitol Records, Alan Livingston was assigned the task of developing a children’s line for the fledgling record company. He came up with the idea of a read-along record and book set featuring a circus clown named Bozo. The album, Bozo At The Circus sold over a million copies, and helped to push Capitol to the top of the sales charts.

Livingston went on to create read-along sets featuring DIsney, Lantz and Warner Bros characters, but the most successful line was the Bozo series. Voiced by Disney story and voice man, Pinto Colvig with music by Billy May, Livingston wrote and produced Bozo On The Farm, Bozo And The Birds,Bozo Under The Sea, and this one… Bozo And His Rocket Ship. All of the sets were re-released in the LP era, but this one was heavily edited, for obvious reasons. In this album, Bozo makes a survey of just about every ethnic stereotype imaginable. But that isn’t the reason we’re presenting it here. We’re featuring the wonderful work of the illustrators, Norm McCabe and Cecil Beard.

McCabe was an animator at Warner Bros in the 30s and directed in the early 40s. After the war, he turned to commercial work and illustration. He returned to cartoon animation in the mid-1960s, animating the titles to The Pink Panther. He continued to work in the business until his death in 2006. Cecil Beard was an animator and story man at Disney and Columbia. He worked on the Fox & the Crow comic books with Jim Davis in the late 40s, and as an illustrator for Western Publishing in the 1960s. He passed away in 1986.

The most striking thing about these images are the compositions. Notice how the white of the page is used and how small windows in the backgrounds open onto other environments. There’s some really clever use of perspective and depth cues here. Enjoy!

Here are some early illustrations by Felix Lorioux depicting three tales from Perrault published in 1926. These delicate watercolors aren’t as elaborately rendered as the ones in our previous postings of Fables De La Fontaine and Le Buffon des Enfants, but the drawing (particularly of nature) and the composition and framing of the images are beautiful. Enjoy!

I would like to thank the membership of The International Animated Film Society: ASIFA-Hollywood for sponsoring my efforts to get this project off the ground during its first few years. In particular, I owe a debt of gratitude to ASIFA-Hollywood's president, Antran Manoogian. Without his unwavering support and valuable guidance this project would not exist. -Stephen Worth